


waterbearers

by satellites (brella)



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That's the thing about hunters: they hunt. But then, he's never been very gifted when it comes to the chase.</p>
            </blockquote>





	waterbearers

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece (of sorts) to [firekeepers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/837198). And it probably makes even less linear sense than that one did.

You are drowning in the dream. 

Even underwater, even as darkness and pressure swells around your ears and muffles the sound of your frantic heartbeat, you can hear clocks ticking for hundreds of years beyond the aimless curling of your bloated fingers. They rattle and the way midnight strikes, far off in the distance, is both a name to whisper in the quiet and a blood-built battle cry, and you know that if you were not plunging further and further into the depths that soften your spine, you would reach for your spear. You would sprint. You would  _hunt_. 

You wake up gasping and shivering and nauseous, and your father looks down at you like vermin and as you choke out your name to the smell of dust and your own tears, you can only see him pinned to a wall with errant eyes, his hand only a centimeter away from your eviscerated mother's. 

"I—I already  _told_  you—" you scream, messy, angry, terrified; "My name is Casey Blevins!" 

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the dream, you're running. 

Sweat and blood and mud and tears are streaking your burning face, and your shoes have been worn down to nothing. The soles of your feet are numb with pain and there are jagged rocks between your broken toes, and you're leaving bloody tracks in the dirt and on the trees and in the night as your arms pump clumsily through the air. Your lungs are searing with exertion and blind, careening terror, and your heart thunders out a frenzied tempo that throbs through you from your Adam's apple to your torn and gnawed-down fingernails, and you're certain that if you take one more desperate step, one more leap, you'll fall to your knees and die, curled in on yourself and shaking and sobbing. 

They're so close. Everyone is so close. You can hear the beat of a thousand hooves and heels from behind you, and as you run from them all, as you cry without shame or control, ragged and noisy and desolate like a little kid, as your knees send jolts of pain up to your abdomen, all you want to do is go home. 

"Atta boy. Keep it up, Hunterino," your mother tells you gently from somewhere in the sky. "You're almost there. I'm so proud of you, Hunter. I'm so proud of you." 

_Stop struggling. This isn't going to hurt if you keep still. It'll only feel like a pinch. Just a pinch. Concentrate, now. Tell me: what time does that clock say?_

_Are you absolutely sure?_

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Casey, Casey; you gotta hear this," he's babbling excitedly into your ear, and his lean finger is jabbing with enthusiasm at the open page he's holding up to you as you both crowd your way down the busy hallway. "Listen. 'Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure. For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.'" 

He finishes, beaming over at you as though he's just unveiled something tragic and beautiful and thrillingly new. You smile a little – at the round bump at the tip of his nose, at the two dimples in the corners of his upturned mouth, at the fleet sparks in the backs of his verdant eyes, all of them offered up to you. 

"It's nice," you say, and you absolutely mean it. "What's it from?"

" _The Odyssey_ ," he replies, snapping the book closed and holding it up illustratively. He lowers it, then, and glances down, and the smile goes from enthused to bashful. "It made me think of you." 

You flip casually through the book a few days later in the library when he's in the bathroom, and your eyes sail over a passage underlined in shaky red. 

_Stand by me – furious now as then, my bright-eyed one – and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess, with you to brace me._

"What took you so long?" you joke when he half-jogs back about twenty minutes later. "Meet a pretty girl?" 

"Yeah," he replies immediately, plopping back into his chair and gazing reverently at you. He doesn't look away. "How'd you know?" 

Your lips twitch upwards and your whole posture softens. 

"Lucky guess." 

 

 

* * *

 

 

The mid-autumn sun falls in crisp ribbons on the Academy lawn. Hunter's name feels odd on her shouting and insistent tongue, and Jade is snarking out something about maybe playing hard to get, and she keeps telling herself, over and over, that the only reason her heart is slamming against her chest plate so painfully is because she's short on time, and not because of Hunter's blank and broken face only a little while ago, as though she'd stuck him to the wall with a javelin through the gut. 

She catches his eye, through the clamoring confusion, and as he looks at her, all traces of devotion and delight spluttered into nothing in his now-hollowed-out gaze, and as he slips away, and as she hollers his name again, and as she calls out for him to wait, she feels as though they are now playing each other's roles, because she knows that she'll never catch him.

She has never been good at chasing. There is a place at the nape of Hunter's neck with a single freckle on it, and she spots it when, for the first time, he turns away from her – but she watches it vanish and she remembers an odd dream she'd once had and only a little while later, she is twenty-four, and she cannot remember what color his eyes had been, that earnest boy who had never asked her why she was crying. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He dreams about her, once. It's nothing like the dreams Ike always insists on regaling him with; she doesn't ride him or scrape her teeth over his throat or meet his skin with hers: she just leaves him. 

She's in nothing but wild blonde hair and a bare, warm stomach, curled up sleeping next to him in his dormitory bunk, and her cheeks are pink and she whispers in her sleep and all he wants to do is brush the straying strands out of her soft and vulnerable face, but he can't move: he can only watch as, gradually, she wakes up, and the morning light races up her back and turns her hair to a solar cascade and she slips out from the sheets, her fingers lingering over his navel, her eyes welling up with tears as she murmurs to an empty room that she doesn't want to go. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

" _Hunter_?" Jade asks with astonishment, but not a bad kind – truth be told, she looks thrilled. "You had a dream about  _Hunter_? For real?"

Casey huffs and folds her underwear a little more firmly. Zoe lets out a noticeable snort from her bunk, one foot jiggling in the air to (apparently) dry her freshly painted toes faster.

"My condolences," she drawls with a pointed smirk.

Casey ignores her, turning to Jade.

"It was nothing," she deflects, and it's about half-true. "We didn't  _do_  anything; we just..." 

She softens slightly, her eyes lingering on the pair of Gryffindor pajama shorts in her hand.

"He just held me," she says quietly. "Like we had nowhere to go. Like we had all the time in the world." She  _tsk_ s softly and finishes folding the bright red garment, setting it aside in the pile at the foot of her bed. "It doesn't matter. It was only..."

"A fluke?" Jade supplies slyly.

Casey nods, chewing her lip, remembering Hunter's unsure hands on her tremoring back, remembering the promises he made just because he wanted her to stop crying, remembering how little he'd asked her, how little he'd wanted to know, before he'd assured her of things that she knew were not true.

"It's not okay," she had whimpered, brokenly, into the dampened fabric of his shirt, her fist clenching a ball of it just over his heart. "It's not... it's not okay, Hunter; it's  _not okay_." 

"It's gonna be," he had vowed in a rush, and he had clung to her more tightly, and his lips had just barely ghosted over her forehead, and his palm had placatingly stroked her hair. "I promise. I promise." 

" _Promises were made to be broken_ ," her father had told her, as night had reclined over the rooftops and the fireflies had flickered to life. He had not said anything more.  

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Promises were made to be broken, kiddo," his mother tells him, with glimmering eyes and a gentle smile, and Hunter is twelve and he's crying; sloppy, snotty tears that he doesn't understand. "That's why we have to take extra-good care of them." 

 

 

* * *

 

 

"You're not going in?" she asks, and even though her eyes are blocked by round, violet sunglasses, he can still see her eyebrows raised high and askance. 

He looks out over the lake – one of the Academy's many pride and joys, a glittering disc of blue a half-mile off-campus – and sees Jade reclining in the shade, sees Ike staring for a beat too long at her freckled legs, sees Jun frowning watchfully at the splashing and laughing students in the water, sees Zoe in her bikini deflecting a whole gaggle of ogling boys with a single flick of her wrist.

He pulls his aviators down onto his slightly sunburned nose. Casey is still blinking expectantly at him, waiting for an answer. 

"Nah," he replies, and scratches the back of his neck with a grimace. "I can't swim." 

Casey's eyes widen and her lips purse and Hunter waits for her to laugh at him.

Instead, with the sun spraying her skin with light, she tugs her oversized white t-shirt over her head, ties her hair off into a tight bun, and grabs his wrist. He flushes, like an idiot, and her bikini is bright red, and her tan lines are perfect.

"Well, c'mon, then," she says briskly, already leading him toward the water. "I'll teach you."

It's pretty Ike-ish of him, to be honest, and that just makes him feel extremely gross—but he almost hopes he drowns, just so she'll give him mouth to mouth.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"That..." She gasps, her hand flying to her mouth. "That was you. You're the papers. You're the headbump!" 

Hunter stuffs his hands sheepishly into his pockets. "Yeah, well, you're just lucky my skull's made of military-grade steel." 

For the first time since her dead parents, since the flood, since the cave, Casey clutches at her cheeks and laughs. 

He knows it would be a good time to kiss her. But he doesn't. 

He never will. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Running had always been your destiny, you suppose – because you are always running toward her, and she is always just two steps too far out of your floundering reach. 

She's a flash of blonde hair around a corner you're too slow rounding. She's a swung-out arm in a thicket you can't reach before the bombs fall. She's the shout of a revolution you're still too young to catch up to. And you are always, always too late. 

Always. 

"Casey?" you hear yourself croak as the light grows brighter. And as it all goes white, as your shins throb from exertion, as the ground falls out from underneath you, you grab her slipping hand. In every war, you think, you will do the same thing you are doing now: you will refuse to let her go. 

And then the pain comes. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _When thou passest through the waters, I shalt be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee._ (Isaiah 43:32)

 

 

* * *

 

 

You see deserts, wars, murders, dinners, sunrises, earthquakes, eruptions, meteors, tsunamis, planets, fires, mountains, oceans, megalodons, children, grasshoppers, kingdoms, ruins, gardens, libraries, constellations, footprints, graveyards; you see Atlantis and Babylon and the Tower of Babel as it crumbles from Heaven; you see families and widows and emperors and conquerers and peasants; you see starvation, and hope, and impossible love; you see stone and flint and candlelight and snakeholes; you see turrets and pyramids, forests and caves, sins and promises; you see carnivals and butterflies and spider-webs and a downpour—

You see his hand, sweaty and shaking, gripping yours, and you see the spaces between your fingers open up for his and you see the sea bearing down upon you both. 

You hear the universe. You hear the earth. And then you hear his voice. 

You hear your name. 

"I don't want to go," you murmur into the darkness as, naked, you slip out of bed and kiss his forehead. He sleeps, forever dreaming. 

And then the pain comes. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t know why he ever bothers telling people to wake up when he knows for a fact that they aren’t going to. It started with a grave he hadn’t seen filled in and it went on to a pair of broken, bloodied glasses and a half-spoken line from  _12 Monkeys_ , and it continued into a pit of snakes and torn-out red hair and talk of silver streaks in the sky, and now it’s Irina’s protective war cries echoing through the trees as she opens fire on a ghost whose hand is no doubt approaching her head, to push out the eyes and make holes like the line of dark red ones currently splayed over Casey’s forehead.

He’s kneeling in the dirt with scabs on his knees and elbows and blood dribbling down from his nose and he’s rocking back and forth like a kid, and he can see Casey’s eyeballs somewhere at her cheeks and he can see bones jutting out from the flesh of her face, and her blonde hair is cold and matted in his cradling, shaking hands and it’s leaving warm, sticky liquid in the lines of his palms and she’s whimpering, softly, her fingers twitching uselessly over a patch of weeds. 

“You’re gonna be okay,” he’s been saying, over and over for the past five minutes, to the point that his voice is now hoarse. “You’re fine, you’re fine, we’re gonna be fine; we’re gonna be fine. Okay? Okay… okay… okay…” 

“Hnn…” she croaks, her arm spasming. Her voice is feeble and sounds almost dreamy, even though he can barely hear it. “T…tr… be… p’c…nic…”

“Yeah,” he whispers, and his tears are falling onto her chest. “Yeah, yeah, totally. One of those. Picnic. You and me. Right now. You just gotta—”

She jerks slightly in his arms and he shouts wordlessly, doubling over, his face wrenching up in agony and protest, but she goes still in just seconds. He cups one side of her mangled face in his hand and tenderly brushes her hair out of it, because she wouldn’t like it getting in the way, and that’s when his breathing starts to come faster, more shallow, until he’s feeling dizzy and sick and his whole body is quaking, and he’s shaking her shoulders and yelling at her to wake up, to open the eyes that have been shoved out of her, and he can’t hear Irina anymore. 

“No no no no no,” he whimpers, pushing her hair away, resting his trembling thumb at her earlobe and gritting his teeth until they hurt. His sobs are peppered with barks of wild laughter, and he curls over her, holding her to his chest, his forehead pressing into the space between her neck and shoulder. It smells like vanilla, and it smells like blood. “You’re okay, right? You’re fine! We’re fine, we’re fine, we’re fine, we – no, no, no, Casey, _NO_!” 

The last syllable rips out of him in a roar that shatters the open air around them, and everything inside of him, every bone, clenches around its denial, its refusal, and suddenly the insides of his eyelids burn and go white and—

“Ow!” 

He yelps, his papers flying out of his hands. The middle of his forehead throbs from the impact with another skull, and his tongue definitely feels like it’s bleeding from where he just bit it. He blinks his eyes open again, finally having the good sense to hunker down to the floor and scramble to pick up everything he’s dropped.

He looks up to apologize to the other half of what has to be the most ridiculous collision of his life, but any opening sentence he’d have had dissolves in his mouth at the sight of cascading blonde hair, a slender hand covering the face that it frames. 

“Oh God,” the girl says, sounding disgusted. Her papers are still scattered at her smooth knees. “Don’t look at me.” 

 

 

* * *

 

 

"It's over," Casey whispers into his ear. She is a trickster and a liar and she holds the world at the end of a tangle of fraying threads, but right now, in the gunfire, in the war, she is pried open at every bone and every eyelash, and he still doesn't kiss her. 

"Yeah," he replies in a hush, his hands framing her face. "Over andover again." 


End file.
